Why do we
exist, what are we and why does it matter? As creatures of logic and reason
it seems unreasonable to say that every thought, desire and event in the
entire universe has a direct association with the individual. This physical
manifestation called you, whether fathomable in its entirety or not is who
you are! A negative reaction to the statement that you have created
everything in your world; body, mind, personality, dreams and shortcomings
exemplifies the fact that you see your conscious mind as a sole power
broker. Ironically, whether you believe you have self-created this
individual called you or not, you would be right in both cases. You the
conscious thinker or ego has not, but the larger ‘you’ the intuitive
mind within has.

A
fascinating compendium of stories, essays, thoughts and poetry from one
woman's life. The daughter of a Pan Am pilot, she grew up overseas, spending
time in Turkey and attending school at Châtelard in Les Avants,
Switzerland, before moving on to Elmira College. Her recollections are
illuminating, often poignant, and always interesting. A book the reader will
come back to time and again.

Dancing
at the Gold MonkeyAllan
LearstA young naval officer crashes his fighter jet in the South China Sea,
forever changing the lives of the five soldiers who find his body. They move
through gritty post-Vietnam Detroit with the women they love in this linked
collection of psychological drama, sexual escapades, and latent violence
tinged with compassion, grief, and love, arriving finally at the death of
one man’s son in Iraq.

"Time jumps in
this accomplished story cycle, as does the boundary betwixt reality and
dream, memory and imagination. . . . And war, as it will, soaks all. Learst
writes with the special visceral authority of combat seen and visions
earned. Vital, necessary reading."
—Donald Anderson, author of Fire Road

"The destruction
of the human spirit at the hands of an experience that is as emotionally
pyrotechnic and morally absurd as the behavior of [Learst's]
characters."
—Gordon Weaver, author of Count a Lonely Cadence

The warm-hearted story
of Louis Armstrong and 12-year-old Fred, who learns about jazz—and life—from
the great musician himself.

"When
Louis was home in Queens, neighborhood kids would gather around as he
brought them into jazz. His music still vibrantly lives around the world,
and his spirit of humaneness lives in Travels with Louis by Mick
Carlon, teacher of jazz to the young of all ages."
—Nat Hentoff"

Thanks to his friendship with the great Louis Armstrong, twelve-year old
Fred sees his world expand from ice cream and baseball in Queens to jazz at
the Village Vanguard, a civil rights sit-in in Nashville, and ecstatic
concerts in London and Paris. A wonderful story, which rings true on many
levels."
—Michael Cogswell, director, Louis Armstrong House Museum

Born in the midst of
the Ethiopian–Eritrean Civil War, Tewodros "Teddy" Fekadu
survives abandonment and famine as his family flings him unwanted across
borders and regions, into orphanages, and finally onto the streets of Addis
Ababa. Spanning five countries and three continents, the Catholic Church,
and Japanese detention centers, this is a tale of defiance and triumph, and
also of family love—unacknowledged by his wealthy father, abandoned by his
desperately poor mother, Teddy is nurtured along the way by staunch
individuals despite his ambiguous place in rigid family tradition: his
father's mother, a maternal aunt, a Catholic priest, and even his father's
wife.

"An affirmation of life and
the indestructibility of one man's will to make the most of it."
—Ian Wynne, author of The Pawn and Shadows by My Side, former editor of
Human Rights Defender, Amnesty International

As the anti-Vietnam War movement
drew to a close, a twenty-six-year-old unknown playwright began an affair
with a glamorous older woman, a feminist activist and acclaimed
poet/novelist at the height of her career. What she saw in a neurotic,
sexually naïve, poorly educated but very sweet guy was apparent to no one,
especially him. Using a wildly self-skewering narrative voice Ira Wood
re-imagines his early years with Marge Piercy in a series of chronologically
linked essays, never failing to raise the question that few have failed to
ask:
You're married to Her?

With the brazen candor of Toby
Young's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People and the wicked lunacy
of David Sedaris, Wood tells tales of his first true love, who he told his
parents were dead; his disastrous affair with a promiscuous single mother,
while he was involved with Piercy; his childhood dependence on speed; and
running for public office on a lark—and winning—only to find himself
responsible for the government of a small town. Thirty years later he's
still married to Her, confident enough to share, and laugh at, what men do
when their behavior slips to the level of their self-esteem.

Nine-year-old Danny
stows away on a Georgia train—the train of Duke Ellington. Through Danny's
eyes, we meet some of America's finest musicians as he accompanies them on
their 1939 European tour, when the train was briefly held in Nazi Germany.
Says Nat Hentoff, "I knew Duke Ellington for 25 years. The Ellington in
this book is the man I knew."

"Duke used to say
that the individual sound of a musician revealed his soul. Mick Carlon is a
'soul' storyteller." —Nat Hentoff

"A ripping good
yarn that plunges the reader into the world of Duke Ellington and the Europe
and America of 1939."—Brian Morton, The Penguin Guide to Jazz

The author's stories
explore the vagaries and vicissitudes of love and lust, of loneliness and
loss. Tonally they range from the dark to the darkly comic, from the
optimistic to the outright silly. Geographically they wander from Greece to
Maine, from Vermont to the fictional Hobson’s Choice, somewhere near Troy,
NY. The title story is a mock self-help manual on how to fall out of love;
“Men in Brown” is a rollicking account of a woman infatuated with her
UPS man. Wherever Connor’s characters find themselves, whether lucky or
unlucky in love, whether in their teens or middle age, they cling
tenaciously to the belief that the quest for love is self-validating, that
love is yet possible.